The room spun. He was here because of his self-esteem, which was shot to hell after his divorce. And now… this. The man who made school a living hell. The person who used to call him names was now the person he was supposed to pour his soul out to.

He tried to speak, to say something, anything. But his voice caught in his throat. He just pointed at the nameplate on the desk, his eyes wide. The words wouldn’t come. He blinked rapidly, his chest feeling incredibly tight.

Emotion: astonished

Cluster: Surprise / Confusion
PC1 (Valence): -0.84 Negative
PC2 (Disposition): -0.24

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion astonished. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 astonished stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the astonished emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the astonished vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:
que0.448
de0.350
la0.323
l0.307
incred0.266
Suppressed:
own-0.289
cheerfully-0.231
enjoyed-0.224
开心-0.221
ี่ยว-0.219